Wikipedia talk:Vaccine safety

New Research: Characterizing Existing Practices for Identifying and Mitigating Knowledge Gaps
Hi All,

My name is Jim Maddock, and I’m with a researcher at Northwestern University working on identifying missing content on Wikipedia. As a first step, we want to talk to members of Wikipedia’s editor community to better understand how editors currently identify and add missing content. Participants must be Wikipedia editors who speak English and will be compensated for their time.

For more details about our project, please refer to our project meta page. If you are interested in participating, please fill out this screener and consent form. Additionally, feel free to reach out to me at maddock@u.northwestern.edu if you have any thoughts and suggestions. Thanks!

Study Information
Study Title: Characterizing Existing Practices for Identifying and Mitigating Knowledge Gaps

PI: Darren Gergle

IRB Study #: STU00212033

Cheers, Jmads-nu (talk) 16:19, 16 July 2020 (UTC)

Archie Kalokerinos page antivax stuff
Hi,

I don't feel like editing the page as I dunno how to fix it properly, but the page: Archie Kalokerinos has recently been edited in a few places like replacing "These claims are not supported by scientific evidence." by "These claims are supported by scientific evidence." (however still linking to an article that wasn't supportive), and the like.

Could someone have a look?

Thanks

YannickPatois (talk) 14:45, 14 January 2021 (UTC)


 * Thanks for this note, YannickPatois. I've reverted the recent edit that said that.  WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:42, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

vaccine hesitancy and vaccine safety information
One reason for vaccine hesitancy is that questions about safety tend to be answered with pro vaccine propaganda rather than information. What is the risk of anaphylaxis with each vaccine? Gullane Barre? When I look up "vaccine safety" I would like that information, not a harangue to combat "hesitancy." — Preceding unsigned comment added by Dersu1 (talk • contribs) 13 April 2021 19:29:57 (UTC)
 * Where are you referring to, here? Wikipedia is not a collection of statistics - if you're referring to here in this or other articles, then that's not a problem here. Wikipedia publishes ideas and facts, not indiscriminate statistics just to make you comfortable. -bɜ:ʳkənhɪmez (User/say hi!) 21:57, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Hello from New York City based COVID-19 Wikipedia task force
Hello I'm User:wil540 art the current wikipedian-in-residence at Sure We Can, heading up the Sure We Can COVID19 Wikipedia Task Force. We have been focusing on using wikipedia to spread factual information about COVID-19 by translating a basic version of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City article into 20 languages spoken here in multi-lingual New York City, in addition to other COVID-focused editing. In our research and editing, we've pin pointed some important articles to write and questions to answer. In writing the COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in the United States article and our other research, we've found that some of the vaccine hesitancy in the USA comes from people being scared of the vaccine safety. For that reason, we think it would be important for the Pharmacovigilance of the COVID-19 vaccines article to be written to show people how vaccines are being tested and verified as safe.

Furthermore, in our research we've come across the following wikipedia project languages that are spoken here in New York City that do not have a COVID-19 vaccine article:
 * Tagalog
 * Yiddish
 * Haitian Creole
 * Swahili
 * Malagasy

We have also found that a lack of understanding about what it means to be a High-risk individual can lead people to think they are safe and do not need the vaccine when they are in fact high risk. For this reason, we created the High-risk population article and think this would be a good article to translate into other languages.

We would love to collaborate with the vaccine safety project. We would love to co-host a Vaccine Safety Edit-a-thon or something similar with the project

To reach us, please comment on our TalkPage or reach out directly: info@surewecan.org or 1-347-463-9257.

Thank you. --Wil540 art (talk) 21:10, 4 September 2021 (UTC)
 * Hi thanks for doing this and thinking about language coverage.  How did this work out?  Can we help with integration of any results? – SJ +  16:33, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Hi @Sj, thank you the inquiry, I would like to do a more in depth analysis of the results. According to the Langviews Analysis we garnered around 16,000 views on the translated versions of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City article that we worked on, with Spanish, Hebrew, Korean, Russian, Swahili the top 5 most popular translations of the 17 languages we translated into. We also wrote articles for COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy in the United States and High-risk people which have received ~ 68,000 views. I would say it was a pretty good return on their investment in terms of outreach. In total, I was paid by the hour at the NYC minimum wage of 15/hr totaling around 300 dollars total for the four edit-a-thons via a COVID-19 outreach grant through NYC Health + Hospitals. (I did donate time in addition to the 15 paid hours to the events, to make them possible).
 * I would like to do one last effort that updates all the articles that we translated, perhaps when the local NYC pandemic declaration is eventually rescinded. I welcome any suggestions or proposals for collaboration. Wil540 art (talk) 00:15, 17 April 2023 (UTC)

Ongoing overhaul of Wikipedia:Vaccine safety/Sources
Hello everyone. As part of a grant-funded project for the organization Hacks/Hackers, I am working on overhauling the Vaccine safety/Sources page. My goals for this overhaul are to: (1) make this page easier to use by Wikipedia editors; (2) keep automatically in sync with other sources; (3) introduce new features such as feeds of new sources being added to articles in scope for this project.

At this point in time, my contributions will focus on the /Sources and /Perennial sources subpages. In time, I may propose a more comprehensive overhaul of the WikiProject and its layout to make the project more useful. However, I will be working gradually toward this, and do not have specific plans yet.

The changes I have made so far have sought to consolidate the different kinds of information and to make the table of sources easier to use. Please let me know if this has disrupted anyone's workflows, since I understand VSAFE's own perennial sources table is somewhat derived from the wiki-wide WP:RSP. Some of the data is presented as footnotes. The rest is safe in the revision history of course and I am thinking of better ways of presenting it on the page. I am trying to strike a balance between being easy to consume (particularly if you're not already familiar with it) and expressing enough relevant information. Harej (talk) 17:57, 7 April 2023 (UTC)
 * Great -- we can also figure out how to integrate these assessments into wikidata. – SJ + 16:09, 28 April 2023 (UTC)
 * I would like to show you my work at Vaccine safety/Sources. Here is a summary of the changes I made:
 * Reorganized certain lists into new subpages such as Images and Data
 * Linked to the perennial sources table instead of embedding it directly. I also made changes to that table to streamline its presentation.
 * Added a new metrics dashboard
 * Add new reports, with alerts as those reports change. These pages are updated by a bot under development.
 * Vaccine safety/Discussions is currently just a listing of links to talk pages, but I hope to create a feed of new talk page threads on relevant discussion pages at some point in the future.
 * My goal with this work is to make these pages easier to use, especially to those not already familiar to them, and to make them useful on an ongoing basis. This is a starting point, but I would like to know if this could potentially be useful, or if there is something else that could make the page more useful. Harej (talk) 01:02, 7 May 2023 (UTC)
 * Netha Hussain, since you were originally involved in the development of this project, I am interested in your feedback. Harej (talk) 21:48, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

Proposed new tabs
I would like to propose streamlining the navigation of this project with this new navigation template:

Specific changes include consolidating the navbox and messages links under "Tips" and from "Tasks" I linked to the missing topics, Wikidata lists, and COVID-19 subpages. I would be interested in doing more work down the line to clean up these pages, but first I propose this high-level organizational scheme. Harej (talk) 01:16, 7 May 2023 (UTC)


 * @Harej: This is a great idea! Please go ahead and continue the work as you see fit, and clean up the pages. If there is anything I can do to help with your work, I will be happy to get involved. Netha   (talk)  17:59, 9 May 2023 (UTC)

Shortening alert text
Try putting the domain in question on the first line. The whole alert can be reduced from 4 lines to 2: 
 * Frequent domain:
 * appears N times  (report / article history)

– SJ + 16:54, 11 May 2023 (UTC)

Wikipedia does not exist to encourage vaccine uptake
Grumpy talpedia, here again to be grumpy about public health advocacy on wikipedia and concern that it might amount motivated WP:ADVOCACY with poor sourcing.

In my opinion, editors can edit for whatever reason they like, but the pages they create should be WP:DUE and balanced so I don't necessarily object to a focus on so-called "misinformation". I'd just say that advocating for vaccine uptake is not wikipedia's goal, wikipedia's goal is is to give a balanced summary of topics using the best sources, and care should be taken to ensure that article's are WP:DUE rather the designed to increase vaccine uptake.

With vaccines it's all well and good and simple. But you should bear in mind that identical arguments about "vaccine safety" apply to things like psychoactive medication, which can extreme and at times permanent side effects and the use of which can be motivated by social, and behaviour control and with diagnosis processes that are far from simple. Tal pedia 23:54, 12 May 2023 (UTC)
 * Dear grumpy Tal, this is a late reply but: I agree. I suspect most people working on this wikiproject would also. We have a few reactive wikiprojects addressing specific trends in disinformation (not just misinfo), and this is one since anti-vax conspiracy theories became such a successful attractor for coordinated astroturfing. There is an equivalent movement to counter 'natural health' advocacy, not because nature isn't healthy (it is!) but because of the volume of unreliable sources added by people trying to add their favorite alternative treatments, usually in place of and not as a footnote to mainstream treatments.  As I see BD2412's new draft below highlights. :) – SJ +  20:23, 14 January 2024 (UTC)

Anti-vaccine activism now in mainspace
I have just moved Anti-vaccine activism from draft to mainspace. It is still a very short article, and is undoubtedly missing a lot of stuff, including specific notable incidents and theories. Any improvement would be appreciated. Cheers! BD2412 T 16:58, 27 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you, it's looking rather good now. – SJ + 20:24, 14 January 2024 (UTC)
 * Yes, it is not by any means "a very short article" any more. BD2412  T 15:48, 13 June 2024 (UTC)